TESOL and TESD in Remote Aboriginal Australia: The “True” Story?

It is widely recognised that teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and teaching English as a second dialect (TESD) in remote Indigenous Australia have a history of repeated failure of both policy and practice. National language testing has been been forcefully attacked by TESOL specialists, producing strong debate amongst politicians and educators. Meanwhile, the teachers in these remote communities, usually female, non‐Indigenous outsiders, are not consulted and rarely remain in these teaching locations. This article tells the story of how we, as researchers, developed a narrative inquiry project to investigate the situated stories of three teachers. Most immediately we noted how the stories we heard were as shocking for their silences as for what they told us, and the “truth” they offered lay primarily in the magnetism of narrative itself through the vitality of the “self” that came to life within the teacher's story. Unpredictably, however, and of greater significance for our understanding, our project confronted us with our own complicity in the silencing technologies effected by both the methodological processes and textual products of narrative study. We came to conclude that there is an inherent paradox at the heart of narrative inquiry which must be addressed in all its complexity if its emancipatory and voice‐releasing goals are to be realised.